An Oxfam study shows that almost half of all people live in poverty. The extremely rich, on the other hand, are getting richer – and their wealth is growing faster and faster.
dpa | There are more and more billionaires in the world – and their wealth is growing and growing. This emerges from a report that the Development organization Oxfam published at the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Accordingly, the approximately 3,000 billionaires worldwide owned 18.3 trillion US dollars (approximately 15.75 trillion euros) in 2025. Since 2020, they have become more than 80 percent richer, adjusted for inflation. At the same time, almost half of humanity lives in poverty.
For the report, Oxfam used estimates from the US business magazine Forbes on the assets of billionaires with data from the World Bank and those from the UBS World Wealth Report.
In 2025, the wealth of billionaires will have grown by around 16 percent – three times faster than the average of previous years, explains Oxfam. The twelve richest people now have more money than the poorest half of the world’s population, which is more than four billion people.
German billionaires are also getting richer
The richest man in the world, Elon Muskaccording to Oxfam’s calculations, earns as much in four seconds as an average person earns in a year. He would have to give away more than $4,500 per second for his wealth to shrink.
A German billionaire earns the average annual income in Germany in less than an hour and a half
According to Oxfam, the number of billionaires in Germany also increased significantly in 2025, by a third to 172. Adjusted for inflation, their total assets increased by around 30 percent to $840.2 billion.
A German billionaire earns the average annual income in Germany in less than an hour and a half, Oxfam calculates. The development organization warns that the large gap between rich and poor is also “an ideal breeding ground for anti-democratic forces.” The federal government must go along with this higher taxes for the rich counteract.
Oxfam is concerned that the economic power of billionaires is clearly reflected in political power. That undermines democracy. According to Oxfam, 100 billionaire families invested $2.6 billion in the last US presidential election campaign. Seven of the ten largest media companies are also at least partly owned by billionaires.
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